Since the calendar turned to July, the college football media has begun to swing out of offseason mode and into season preview mode. Just one year of the season starting late last year messed up a lot of people’s internal calendars, I think, which makes it feel like the season is coming up fast. SEC Media Days begins in a week, for goodness’ sake.
I have sampled the budding coverage from a variety of national outlets to see what the general temperature is on Florida going into 2021. I have heard once consistent thing no matter the source:
Crickets.
No one is spending time going into the Gators for this year. I get it, even if it’s a little disappointing.
When win totals came out last month, UF’s over/under generally was set around 9 or 9.5. The betting houses were basically asking the public whether the Gators would get at least one win out of the games against Alabama, Georgia, and LSU and also not drop something they shouldn’t like the road games at Kentucky or Missouri.
Now, given that Alabama’s over/under pretty much everywhere is 11.5 wins, there’s an implication that Florida’s would be 10 or 10.5 if not for the luck of the rotation giving the Crimson Tide and not Mississippi State or Arkansas this year. That alone is a vote of confidence in Dan Mullen, as after losing a ton of talent and Heisman finalist, the team basically would be penciled in for double-digit wins against a normal schedule.
And it very well could be that the perceived guaranteed loss to Bama is the cause of the silence about UF this year. Georgia got Arkansas as its rotating West opponent, so it’s like the Bulldogs are starting a game up in the East standings. Indeed, just last year it was UGA drawing the auto-loss to Alabama that allowed Florida to win the division despite the heinous LSU loss late.
I’ve already written about how a win over Nick Saban would change things for Mullen and his program, so I won’t repeat myself here. I will note, however, that an expectation of nine wins and little real shot at a division title would seem to be Florida’s level of irrelevance.
Believe it or not, that’s actually a good thing. When Ron Zook was winning eight a year and not contending strongly for the East most of the time, the Gators were relevant for the wrong reasons. Same went for Will Muschamp after his second season, or even McElwain after his first despite his second straight East win while going 8-3 in 2016. That’s when the program goes on hot seat watch, and that’s no one’s idea of a good reason for being top of mind in the general sports media.
Now, it’s true that Mullen did just go 8-4 last year. However, all eight wins were over SEC teams, and I think everyone who paid attention knows the bowl effort wasn’t representative of the season as a whole. No one has to like how the team performed, but it doesn’t say anything about the team that pushed Bama in the SEC title game.
That said, the bowl performance was something of a preview of the 2021 team, and it was found wanting in a pretty serious way. That’s not entirely fair, since a lot of players getting their first extended run as starters and/or contributors were going against a team that was playing its eleventh contest in the season. But if everyone’s going to take seriously Mullen’s own (mostly accurate) contention that the true 2020 team wasn’t on display that night, then it’s just going to be hard to force through the second layer of nuance that it wasn’t really the 2021 team either.
And so, you’re seeing Florida end up in a lot of preseason rankings in a range that suggests the team could make a New Year’s 6 appearance while not challenging a true contender. In other words, copy and paste from the bowl result.
No, Mullen isn’t close to hot seat watch. Todd Grantham definitely is, but coordinators don’t move the dial this early in the season preview cycle. Most fans don’t subscribe to newsletters or follow message boards all year round, so the majority of people looking to these preview magazines, articles, podcasts, and videos are paying attention to the sport for the first time since January. The sport in and of itself, anyway, setting aside the Supreme Court result or NIL stuff that made headlines in mainstream non-sports news coverage.
I’m not convinced that Florida is just going to have a ho-hum 9-3 finish with losses to the usual suspects but wins over everyone they should beat. Even if the team does do that, it’s okay every once in a while. I know it’s frustrating to read that when four teams show up in the top five every year, all the more so with two of them in UF’s conference and one of those two in UF’s division.
I can’t stress how unusual it is to have that situation right now. There’s usually only one or two of those titans at a time, and even Saban himself only won 10+ games twice in five years at LSU. The combination of the Muschamp-McElwain run at UF, the dying years of Jimbo leaving FSU a wreck, and nearly two decades of turbulence at Miami left the state of Florida’s recruiting barn door open for the likes of Alabama, Clemson, and Georgia (among others) to raid freely. It’s going to take a while to kick out the intruders, if it can be done at all at this point. The idea that the best Florida kids should stay in-state hasn’t held this little sway in generations.
So again, Florida might still contend for big prizes as it did last year if a few things break correctly, like Emory Jones balling out and the defense finding its 2019 form again. But the talent drain of last year combined with a bad schedule break may leave the team an irrelevant 9-3.
A floor of 9-3 ain’t too bad given the 2010-17 run, if you ask me.